ISO Files for Intel-based PCs
In order to run Kali “Live” from a USB drive on standard Windows and Macintosh PCs, you’ll need a Kali Linux bootable ISO image, in either 32-bit or 64-bit formats.
If you’re not sure of the architecture of the system you want to run Kali Linux on, on Linux or OS X, you can run the command
uname -m
at the command line. If you get the response, “x86_64″, use the 64-bit ISO image (the one containing “amd64″ in the file name); if you get “i386″, use the 32-bit image (the one containing “i386″ in the file name). If you’re on a Windows system, the procedure for determining whether your system is 32- or 64-bit is detailed on Microsoft’s site.
The images are available both as directly downloaded “.iso” files or via torrent files.
ARM Images
The hardware architectures of ARM-based devices vary considerably, so it is not possible to have a single image that will work across all of them. Pre-built Kali Linux images for the ARM architecture are available for the wide range of devices.
Scripts for building your own ARM images locally are also available on GitHub. For more details see the articles on setting up an ARM cross-compilation environment, and building a custom Kali Linux ARM chroot.
Verifying Your Downloaded Kali Image
Why do I need to do this?
Before you run Kali Linux Live, or install it to your hard disk, you want to be very sure that what you’ve got actually is Kali Linux, and not an imposter. Kali Linux is a professional penetration testing and forensics toolkit. As a professional penetration tester, having absolute confidence in the integrity of your tools is critical: if your tools aren’t trustworthy, your investigations won’t be trustworthy, either.
Moreover, as the leading penetration testing distribution, Kali’s strengths mean that a bogus version of Kali Linux could do a tremendous amount of damage if it were deployed unwittingly. There are plenty of people with plenty of reason to want to stick very sketchy stuff into something that looks like Kali, and you absolutely don’t want to find yourself running something like that.
Avoiding this is simple:
- only download Kali Linux via the official download pages athttps://www.kali.org/downloads or https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux-vmware-arm-image-download/ — you won’t be able to browse to these pages without SSL: encrypting the connection makes it much harder for an attacker to use a “man-in-the-middle” attack to modify your download. There are a few potential weaknesses to even these sources — see the sections on verifying the download with the SHA1SUMSfile and its signature against the official Kali Development team private key for something much closer to absolute assurance.
- once you’ve downloaded an image, and before you run it, always validate that it really iswhat it’s supposed to be by verifying its checksum using one of the procedures detailed below.
There are several methods for verifying your download. Each provides a certain level of assurance, and involves a corresponding level of effort on your part.
- You can simply download an ISO image from an official Kali Linux “Downloads” mirror, calculate the ISO’s SHA1 hash and compare it by inspection with the value listed on the Kali Linux site. This is quick and easy, but potentially susceptible to subversion via aDNS poisoning: it assumes that the site to which, for example, the domain “kali.org” resolves is in fact the actual Kali Linux site. If it somehow weren’t, an attacker could present a “loaded” image and a matching SHA1 signature on the fake web page. See the section “Manually Verify the Signature on the ISO (Direct Download)”, below.
- You can download an ISO image through the torrents, and it will also pull down a file — unsigned — containing the calculated SHA1 signature. You can then use the shasum command (on Linux and OS X) or a utility (on Windows) to automatically verify that the file’s computed signature matches the signature in the secondary file. This is even easier than the “manual” method, but suffers from the same weakness: if the torrent you pulled down isn’t really Kali Linux, it could still have a good signature. See the section “Verify the Signature on the ISO Using the Included Signature File (Torrent Download)”, below.
- To be as close to absolutely certain as possible that the Kali Linux download you’ve obtained is the real thing, you can download both a cleartext signature file and and version of the same file that has been signed with the official Kali Linux private key and use GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) to first, verify that the computed SHA1 signature and the signature in the cleartext file match and second, verify that the signed version of the file containing the SHA1 hash has been correctly signed with the official key.
If you use this more complicated process and successfully validate your downloaded ISO, you can proceed with pretty complete assurance that what you’ve got is the official image and that it has not been tampered with in any way. This method, while the most complex, has the advantage of providing independent assurance of the integrity of the image. The only way this method can fail is if the official Kali Linux private key is not only subverted by an attacker, but also not subsequently revoked by the Kali Linux development team. For this method, see the section on verification using the SHA1SUMS file.
Downloads
| Image Name | Direct | Torrent | Size | Version | |
| Kali Linux 64 bit | ISO | Torrent | 3.0G | ||
| Kali Linux 32 bit | ISO | Torrent | 3.1G | ||
| Kali Linux 64 bit mini | ISO | Torrent | 28M | ||
| Kali Linux 32 bit mini | ISO | Torrent | 28M | ||
| Kali Linux armel | Image | Torrent | 2.1G | ||
| Kali Linux armhf | Image | Torrent | 2.0G |
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